Attack of the Slashers
by TB's LMC
Summary: Written for the 2013 Tracy Island Writers Forum's Halloween "Things That Go Bump In The Night" Challenge. With Halloween only a couple months away, Gordon's getting a head start on the holiday with some great old horror and slasher movies. They're fun, but not real. Right? Rated M for language, violence and multiple character deaths (don't worry, it all ends well).
1. Chapter 1

**ATTACK OF THE SLASHERS**

_Note: Warning for strong language, graphic images (well, written ones) and multiple character deaths. I put this in the M-rated section for a reason!_

Gordon leaned back in the movie theater-style seat with a bucket of popcorn ready for munching in the seat to his left, and a big theater-style drink in the cup holder on the arm. While he didn't much think anymore about the fact that he wasn't in a "real" movie theater – _a la_ one on the mainland where other people besides his own family went – he certainly appreciated what was on the screen in front of him an awful lot more than the drek Hollywood was churning out these days.

"Oh, man," came a familiar low-pitched whine from back at the double-door entrance.

Gordon didn't even have to twist his head around to know who it belonged to.

"Not these again," Alan groaned as he, his own bucket of popcorn and his own big drink came down the five-row aisle. He plopped unceremoniously into one of the six seats in the front row right next to Gordon, put his drink in the drink holder on the arm and stuffed a handful of popcorn into his mouth. "Fie muost cahn't unnersand why you...like this shit."

Gordon grinned as an odd sound something like "Ch ch ch ha ha ha" in amongst some creepy tunes came from huge speakers hidden behind the walls.

"Christ, where'd you go for this one, 1970?"

"Decade too early. 1980," Gordon corrected as the title of the movie flashed before them.

"_Friday the 13__th_?" Alan read, then took a sip of his drink through the straw, swallowed and continued, "This the one where all those teenagers get killed for having sex?"

"Pretty much. Though that could describe a lot of the slasher movies from that time period," Gordon admitted.

"You know, the horror flicks they make these days are a lot more sophisticated."

Gordon shrugged. "Yeah, but Mrs. Voorhees was the first female serial killer on film, Al. It's a _classic_."

Alan rolled his eyes but settled back to watch.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

A good hour into the movie, the popcorn was gone, the drinks were empty and Alan was more than just a little bored. "Gotta take a leak," he said.

Gordon just nodded, not looking away from the screen. Not, that was, until about five minutes later as a blonde girl was being chased through the woods, when he caught movement out of his right peripheral vision. He glanced over, expecting it to just be Alan, or maybe one of his brothers checking out what he was watching.

Well...what he saw wasn't any of them. In fact, it wasn't even a man. He did a double-take, blinked and she was gone. At that very moment, a woman's voice came on-screen and he turned to look at it. His eyes widened. He looked back to the now-empty space a good twenty feet away, then to the screen again.

"Nah," he said, sure his eyes must've been deceiving him. "Couldn't be."

Some time later, after a bathroom break and choosing what his next film would be, Gordon was right back in his favorite seat. He was convinced this spot had the best acoustics even though Virgil insisted the entire theater was acoustically sound no matter where you sat. Big brothers, they just always want to be right, was his attitude.

This time he was setting the way-back machine to 1978 and the Jamie Lee Curtis movie _Halloween_. It'd been a while since he'd checked this one out, and he particularly enjoyed the fact that Michael Myers' mask was a painted one of that old, over-acting actor William Shatner who'd died in the 2020s but left legacies like _Star Trek_ around to make sure future generations knew exactly who he was. He wondered how the guy had felt about having his face turned into a horror movie icon.

Alan never had come back to join Gordon, who figured his younger brother was busy with one of two things that always demanded his attention: the latest race car he was designing, or Tin-Tin. Or both. You never knew with Al.

But that was fine with Gordon. Most of the time, because of the old-style...and sometimes _really_ awful...movies he favored, he found himself alone while watching them. He stood up to stretch his legs and windmill his arms around to loosen his muscles, just as a man in a white sheet wearing glasses over top of them appeared in the doorway where a shirtless girl was calling him Bob. Gordon remembered enough to know the ghost person was Michael Myers and that the girl was about to die, so he turned his back to the screen and bent himself in half to touch his toes a few times. Ah, that always felt good, stretch the old back muscles.

On his fourth time righting himself to ramrod-straight, he couldn't help the small gasp that escaped his lips when something at the back of the theater caught his eye. This time he didn't blink or look away. This time he just stared...for all of the five seconds it took for his eyelids to insist on blinking anyway. In that instant, the figure was gone.

Michael Myers in the theater? On Tracy Island? Yeah. Right. Sure.

"Note to self," he muttered, turning around and sitting back down in the seat, "see if Brains ever finished double-checking the holographic movie projection equipment."

And that was that for another couple of hours. _Halloween_ had finished and on he'd moved to an even older movie called _Psycho_ from 1960. Unlike many of the other flicks he watched, this one he defended to anyone who'd listen that it was far and away one of the best-written horror films in existence to that very day. After all, he argued time and again, anyone who could make you feel sorry for a psycho serial killer _had_ to be a good storyteller..not to mention the caliber of the actors. He barely looked away from the screen on this one, and had almost reached the end...right when a woman named Lila was about to find out who and what Mother was...when a creak to his left caught his attention.

Gordon turned his head at the very moment Lila screamed on-screen, and stifled a choked sound that wanted to come from his throat as his eyes took in, fully black-and-white just like on-screen, a man dressed in a woman's dress, wearing a wig, and wielding a huge chef's knife.

He didn't have to look back at the screen to know who it was.

Gordon swallowed, purposefully moved his eyes back to the movie screen and half-listened as a psychiatrist explained Norman Bates' split personality to a roomful of people. When he looked back to where he'd seen the woman-dressed-as-a-man, there was – of course – no one there.

"You're losing your shit," he whispered, wide-eyed, as a car was being winched out of a swamp, letters shown over that proclaiming this to be THE END of the movie. Maybe he should go talk to Brains right now about the projection equipment...then again, he only had one more movie...the last one he figured he'd watch tonight, the original _Nightmare on Elm Street_. Oh, there was nothing in his opinion that screamed 80s slasher movies more than that one did. He loved Freddy Krueger's outfit, leathery burned face and all. And those nails. He kept forgetting to see if he could find some on eBay just because.

It was the excitement surrounding the prospect of seeing crazy Freddy work his deadly magic that made his decision for him. Gordon settled back to watch Freddy invade teenagers' nightmares and kill them, and considered for a moment that Halloween was just around the corner. He wondered if maybe he could get his brothers – or at least, Alan – to go in on him with making their own haunted house. They could locate it somewhere around Sydney, maybe, since they all knew that area well.

They wouldn't charge anyone for it, it'd just be something for people to enjoy FOC, as Norman Bates would say: Free of Charge. Since nothing these days was free of anything, he was sure it'd be a hit. Dad would probably agree on the grounds of it being philanthropic...in a creepy sort of way.

By the time the first kid had died a bloody sleeping death, Gordon already had the plan formulated for the type of house he'd need and a myriad of gadgets that would help him bring these crazy killer characters to life in a way that was both fun and scream-inducing. By the time the female star of the movie was forcing herself to stay awake to the point of exhaustion, Gordon's mind was filled with outlines and precise locations for various points within the haunted house. He resolved that when this movie was over, he was going to get Virgil to help him draw out his ideas, which he would then present to the rest of their brothers for consideration.

If Virgil helped with the drawings, he'd want to help with the house itself. Alan would do it just for the hell of it, and while he wasn't sure how much Scott would enjoy such a thing, he knew John would go for it because he'd want to throw in some completely unexpected subtleties. Yes, this would be the Tracy Haunted House, and with just under two months left until Halloween, he knew they could pull it off.

Pleased with himself, and locked inside his mind with all his plans, he was missing the final confrontation with Freddy. But he didn't miss the shadow that suddenly appeared in front of him, or the glint of light from the movie projector off something long, silver and...sharp-looking. His head whipped up and his gasp was as loud as any potential victim's might be, when he took in Freddy Krueger standing there smiling garishly at him like Gordon was his next target.

He bolted out of the seat, poised on the balls of his feet for combat. Just like that, Freddy disappeared. Gordon looked up at the screen, eyes wide, as the first end credits began to roll. "Holy shit, Gordo, enough of these for the night," he whispered, turning and making his way to the small spiral staircase that led up to the projection booth. Yep, he definitely needed to get Brains to check the projector, he thought as he powered it down. Because _damn_.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

_Two days later..._

So excited and involved was Gordon with the new Haunted House project that his brothers had all jumped at the chance to be involved with – and that his father had approved, no less – that Gordon forgot all about asking Brains to check anything in the theater. Brains, whose incredible genius had been working overtime to bring Gordon's original...well, revised with Virgil's help...idea to life. On rotation, two of them were at the new site in a suburb of Sydney for twelve hours at a time, overseeing the work. First came the building of the house with electrical wiring and nothing else.

After all, a Haunted House didn't need a bathroom. That's what the spooky outhouse was going to be for. Gordon was actually looking forward to the first time Tin-Tin decided to try to use it. He'd have to make sure he made himself scarce when that happened.

Back on Tracy Island, the young lady in question had been up most of the night working with John, remotely on Thunderbird 5, to restore one of the antenna arrays on a satellite they'd lost contact with two days prior. Exhausted but satisfied that at last the satellite was at full strength again, Tin-Tin staggered into her bedroom suite, pressed the button on the inside control panel that locked the door, pressed another button that closed the curtains over her balcony sliding glass doors, and stumbled sleepily toward her bed.

Rubbing her left eye, which was beginning to hurt from having stared at computer 3-D holographic images for the past ten hours, she was about to faceplant onto her bed when something caught her attention out the peripheral of her right eye. Tin-Tin looked up. She screamed.


	2. Chapter 2

In the bowels of the island, lost within the labyrinth of rooms that was his laboratory, Brains' ears were aware of nothing but the blasting of the original Broadway _Les Miserables_ soundtrack. The rise and fall of operatic tones always kept one track of his mind working on the cadences, rhythms and mathematical complexities that formed what most people simply called music. It served to make his neurons fire even faster, his ideas and thoughts come pouring forth with more force than usual. Having completed his work for what he termed Gordon's Folly, he was now intent upon his next invention: a heavy rescue air, land and sea craft that would be so completely automated, it may make up for the fact that International Rescue was busier than ever, but with the same number of hands as always.

With two tracks of his mind thus focused, the remaining ones were devoted to multiple calculations, theorems, review and digestion of anything and everything he'd ever read. He pulled from an endless store of ideas, logic, theoretical and quantum physics and a lifetime of being a genius, to have so many thoughts going at once it was nearly impossible to gain his attention during such times as this.

It was therefore quite impressive that something outside his own head and the holographic computer he was formulating the design for the new SEAL vehicle, as he was referring to it, even registered on his radar. But register it did. For when the movement chanced to catch his eye, Brains looked up. And froze.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Above-ground on the island, it was nearing nine o'clock in the morning. Gordon and Alan had left two hours earlier for the Haunted House, leaving up-at-4am Scott, up-at-4:30am Jeff and sleepyhead do-I-have-to-roll-out-of-bed Virgil seated at the kitchen table while Grandma served them up pancakes and sausage for breakfast. The delicious aromas woke Virgil up enough that he tucked into his food with vigor, but he was left the last man seated as Jeff and Scott moved to their father's study to review the type of International Rescue administrivia that made Virgil want to hang himself.

Kyrano moved quietly in and out of the kitchen a few times while Grandma finished her duties, kissed Virgil on top of his head and left to do whatever it was grandmothers living in Paradise generally did. Virg hadn't a clue how she passed the time, really. Occupied with this curiosity as he cut another huge bit from his pancake stack, he wasn't at first aware that he wasn't as alone as he'd thought.

It wasn't an actual movement that caught his eye, however. It was some sort of glint off something shiny, catching the kitchen lighting, that made him turn halfway round in his chair to look toward the refrigerator just ten feet away. His eyes grew round. His jaw dropped, half-chewed pancakes sitting on his tongue waiting to be swallowed. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. He wasn't even _sure_ what he was seeing.

Except for the blood dripping from ten long, sharp, silver glinting little knives at the ends of ten fingers. That, he could label. The man that the fingers belonged to, he could not. Unable to move, all he could do was stare as the figure sneered, laughed and moved in.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

On the second floor of the villa, in the private study attached to Jeff's bedroom suite, he and Scott had just finished discussing a small glitch in the software they used to keep IR's books. Scott had his marching orders to fix the glitch and recompile the program so the financial information could be re-uploaded and their bookkeeping kept on track.

Not altogether happy to have to do it, Scott was frowning a little as Jeff's study door swished closed behind him. Jeff rose, cup of coffee in hand, and headed through a connective door into his suite, then out onto the balcony. He often stood here in the morning while finishing his fourth, fifth or sixth cup of coffee, for no other reason than to enjoy the warm breeze, tropical scents and sheer beauty of this private world he had labored for so long to bring to life.

His mind often turned to the past, to reliving the various points along the way that had brought the dream to fruition. Sometimes he would become so lost in memories both fond and painful, that he would lose track of time...and this morning was no different. Coffee cooled in the cup still held in his hand and he sighed as visions of his beautiful Lucy played out before him in vivid technicolor. Such sweet memories, made more perfect by the passage of time and the idolization of the soulmate he'd lost. They consumed him at times such as this, and he allowed himself to indulge.

Being in his private, soundproof suite, there was never expected any sort of interruption but perhaps the chime of someone at his door or, at the very worst, the sound of voices drifting up from the beach far below or from another balcony on this side of the house. So when the sound of his door swishing open reached his ears, it was enough to startle Jeff out of his trip down memory lane. He turned to look at the door, which could be seen as a straight shot from where he was out on the balcony.

His favorite ceramic mug dropped from his hand, shattering on the unforgiving concrete beneath his feet. All his military and combat training kicked in, mind racing, wondering who he was seeing, how they'd gotten there, what was nearest his position that could be used as a weapon. The woman intruding into his bedroom wore a gray sweater, had a manic look in her eyes and a machete in her hand. But it wasn't even that which worried Jeff the most.

It was the blood dripping from the machete's blade that made his gut uneasy. "Who are you?" he asked, tone stone-cold and even.

"Why," she stated in a voice that spoke of years of cigarette smoking, "I'm Mrs. Voorhees, of course."

"Who?" he asked.

She grinned as she slowly advanced upon him. "Why don't you ask your son?" Her voice rose in anger. "Seeing how you have five of them and I no longer have _any_!"

Jeff saw the bloody blade coming at him full-speed with the woman roaring behind it, and had no place to go. No place but over the edge of the balcony, to a forty-foot drop.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Scott grumbled to himself as he powered up the computer on Jeff's desk in the Lounge. Restoring the specialized and top secret software IR used for their accounting wouldn't take long, but finding the code that needed fixing and recompiling the program would take a good two hours. He was telling himself that it was high time Brains invented something less unwieldy so Scott could spend more time playing with his own original jet designs, when a strange noise caught his attention.

It sounded very much like a knife being pulled from a sheath, that sort of metal-on-metal slide he'd heard many times in his life – especially during the Bereznik War. He looked to the left...straight ahead...and then to the right. His brow furrowed, eyes widening when he spotted a figure emerging from the hallway door. He rose to his feet as the figure better came into view and wondered who the hell he was seeing.

It was a large, tall man wearing dirty, dark blue coveralls like an auto mechanic wore. The coveralls were stained with something Scott couldn't identify, and when he looked up at the face he realized it wasn't a face at all, but a mask. Every muscle in his body went taut, prepared for anything, as the white mask with messy brown hair turned to face him. It was then that Scott saw what was in the stranger's right hand: a chef's knife. And the knife was covered in blood.

The man put the thumb and forefinger of his left hand over the blade, and as though it was the most natural action in the universe, wiped the blood off in one swipe, sending it splattering to the hardwood floor. Then he began walking slowly and purposefully toward Scott. It was one of the very few times when Scott had no idea what to do. Who was this person and how had he gotten onto the island to begin with, let alone into IR's nerve center? The portraits showed all five Tracy boys in full uniform, but Scott couldn't make himself move to press the button that would change them to their civilian portraits.

The knife and the man wielding it were halfway to him, then a rustling caught his attention. He looked at the door and yelled, "Grandma!" which made the woman entering the room with a plate of cookies, jump. She saw the knife-brandishing figure as he stopped and turned to face her. His head twisted a little, reminding Scott of a puppy wondering what its human had just said to it, then the mask turned back toward Scott and continued coming at him.

Grandma screamed, cookies flying every which way as the plate dropped from her hands. Scott scooted out from behind the desk and toward the open balcony doors that led to the staircase outside. He was going to draw whoever this was away from his grandmother no matter what. And it worked, for the man followed. Scott hit the SOS button on his watch as the man slowly and methodically followed him step after step out of the Lounge.

"Scott!" he heard his grandmother cry. "_Scott!_"

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Gordon and Alan returned to Tracy Island to find all members of their family gathered right there in Thunderbird 2's hangar awaiting their return. The men glanced at each other when they reached the bottom of their little jet's staircase, noting that each and every person in front of them looked twice as pale as normal. Jeff's watch chimed an incoming call. It was John, who stated that since Gordon and Alan had just landed, he wanted to know what the hell Scott's SOS had been about.

"All right, Gordon," Jeff said sternly. "This ends now."

Wracking his brain for what the hell his dad could be on about, Gordon took more than just a few seconds longer than usual to respond, which left Scott to pick up the pissed-off tone. "I can't believe Brains would be in on it, but if you are, Brains," he stated, turning to look at the befuddled genius, "then you'll get the same toothbrush-and-latrine duty as my brother."

"Wait, hold up," Alan said, putting up a hand and taking a step forward. "What's this all about? What are you accusing Gordon and Brains of doing?"

"Rigging up your awful horror movie creatures right here on Tracy Island!" Tin-Tin spat, accompanied by a look that could kill twenty Tracys.

"What?" Gordon asked, truly astonished. "There's nothing rigged up here."

"Son," Jeff growled in warning.

"Dad, seriously, we haven't rigged _anything_ up on the island. We figured the haunted house would be enough Halloween since we're working on it double in twelve-hour shifts. I've had no time for anything but basic maintenance and sleep when I've been back here."

Jeff glanced at Alan, who replied to the silent query with his hands up defensively. "Oh no, don't look at me. I haven't rigged anything up."

"Brains?" Scott asked suspiciously.

"Well, ah, Scott, I, er...I haven't been out of my, ah, laboratory until this very moment for the, ah, past three weeks."

"That I can attest to," Grandma confirmed. "I've been taking him every meal for just about that long, right down there at his off-lab suite."

"Wait," Virgil said, rubbing his temple as though to stave off the mother of all headaches. "You're telling us all, right here and right now, that none of you have been using anywhere on this island to test those holo-projected weirdos you're intending to use in the haunted house. There are no hidden cameras, no hidden audio devices, nothing motion-activated."

"That's what I'm telling you," Gordon confirmed with an accompanying nod from Alan. "Now that we're clear that I'm guilt-free, would someone mind telling me what's going on that I was tried and convicted before I even landed?"

Jeff sighed, the wind taken out of his sails. He glanced at Scott, who nodded, and then looked at each of the rest of the family in turn. "Tin-Tin saw a man dressed in female clothing emerge from her ensuite bathroom just after finishing up work with John on the D-Satellite's malfunctioning anetennae."

Tin-Tin nodded, eyes still shooting daggers at the two youngest Tracy brothers.

"Brains himself says he saw a man wearing a hockey mask and wielding a machete, down in his lab, while Virgil was being sneered at by a man with razor blades for fingernails."

"That were dripping with blood," Virgil added.

Gordon felt all the blood draining from his face slowly but surely as his father continued.

"I had a conversation – _in my bedroom_ – with some machete-wielding woman who called herself Mrs. Voorhees, and Scott and Mother encountered a white-masked man with a blood-covered knife in the Lounge." Jeff looked directly at Gordon. "So. I'm assuming since you're now ten shades whiter than usual, you know who these...people...are?"

Gordon swallowed hard and nodded. "The way you describe them, I think I do. Let's get to the Lounge and I'll show you."

"Gordo, what the hell's going on?" Alan whispered loudly as the pair led the way to a nearby elevator.

But Gordon didn't reply. For he remembered having seen these people – at least most of them – in the theater while he'd been watching his horror movies three nights ago. And now his family reported being terrorized by those very same people.

As the elevator carrying the two of them, Scott, Jeff and Grandma, ascended, Gordon turned to look at his father. "You say you actually _spoke_ to Mrs. Voorhees."

"How else would I know her name?"

Gordon swallowed hard again. How in the hell was this possible?


	3. Chapter 3

Everyone stood or sat or leaned against something in the Lounge, with John watching both them and his own monitors as Gordon used his dad's desktop computer to cycle through images. He started by pulling up a Google search on _Psycho_ and when he found a screenshot of Norman Bates looking wild and dressed in his mother's clothes, Tin-Tin gasped, hand covering her mouth. At last she allowed Alan to comfort her, rather than looking at him accusingly.

Next came a shot of Jason from the second _Friday the 13__th_ film – which Gordon himself hadn't watched three nights prior, but which Brains confirmed nonetheless was the figure he'd seen in his lab. A picture of Freddy Krueger turned Virgil's tawny skin nearly as white as Tin-Tin's and Gordon had the silent answer he needed. Mrs. Voorhees' photo was a little more difficult to find but when he did, Jeff's lips pursed together in a thin line and the last photo Gordon brought up, that of Michael Myers, got a taut nod from Scott.

"These are all characters from old horror films and slashers," John commented as he looked out over them. "Aren't you making holo-vids of them all and more for the haunted house?"

Gordon nodded as he powered down the computer and stepped out from behind his dad's desk. "Yes. Them plus old favorites like the Mummy, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula. We even threw in Jason, which is who you saw, Brains, and a handful of more recent slasher stars from the last couple of decades. But I _swear_ to you, the equipment didn't get tested beyond the holographic imaging chamber room in Brains' lab."

"That is, er, true," Brains confirmed. "I helped, er, Gordon, Alan a-and Virgil pack every piece o-of that equipment up right in the chamber, a-and they ferried it all out to Tracy Three mid-ah-morning of the day a-after Gordon's movie, ah, marathon."

Gordon's mind was spinning. Then he remembered his first thought after seeing what appeared to be these very same serial killers in the theater and snapped his fingers, startling his grandmother.

"Brains, did you ever check out the theater equipment like I asked?"

"Ah...I-I'm afraid I haven't yet, ah, Gordon."

"What's this all about?" Jeff asked, frustration and annoyance obvious in his voice.

"I asked Brains to recheck the holo-projectors in the theater after the last equipment upgrade we did because they seemed to be glitching. In fact, while I was watching those horror and slasher movies the other night, I saw the very same people you guys are saying you've seen, except for Jason. Right there in the theater while the movies were on, I saw them."

"And you didn't say anything?" Scott asked.

"What, come tell you I saw them come to life? You'd just tell me to stop watching the movies because I was seeing things," Gordon countered, justified in his stance thanks to past history.

"True," Virgil chimed in. Scott scowled at him, but Virgil ignored the look and turned his attention to Gordon. "So you think it's possible the projectors are acting up and somehow sending images of these characters all over Tracy Island?"

"What I saw can't have been a holographic image," Tin-Tin protested. "He...she...whatever it was, it was very real!"

"Mrs. Voorhees _did_ speak to me," Jeff said thoughtfully. "She actually interacted with me as though really having the conversation, not some movie dialogue."

"And there was no movie background involved," Virgil said. "I'm pretty sure there was never a scene in a movie that involved...what'd you call him?...Freddy? In our kitchen."

"Nor did that white-masked demon, I'm sure, ever chase someone through a room that looked like this one," Grandma added with a nod in Scott's direction. "I lost a perfectly good plate of cookies thanks to that. I saw blood on the floor!"

"It wasn't there when I realized he'd disappeared," Scott told them, as if suddenly remembering. "So it _must_ have been holographic, or the blood would still have been there when I ran back up the steps and found Grandma in here white as a sheet with cookies all over the floor."

"But I heard his footsteps," Grandma countered.

"And I heard the sound of a knife being unsheathed," Scott added. "But those are just sounds. There's no physical evidence of what any of us saw, is there?"

"No," Brains said. "There was, ah, nothing left behind in the lab."

"No blood on the kitchen floor," Virgil replied.

"And only my broken coffee mug on the balcony attests to my encounter," Jeff said.

"So where does this leave us?" Alan asked. "Tin-Tin's terrified! Is it possible to just unhook the projection equipment in the theater to stop whatever it is from happening until it can be fixed?"

"You work with Brains and Gordon on that," Jeff said. "John, I want you to go back over 5's recordings from the last 72 hours to see if anything out of the ordinary was recorded and simply didn't trigger any of her alarms."

"On it, Father," John said, then cut his transmission off.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

That night, not very much sleep was gotten on Tracy Island or Thunderbird 5 as all residents were either actively trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the movie projectors or were simply too spooked by what they'd seen and the fact that no one could adequately explain it, to close their eyes.

Finally, at around two in the morning, Alan managed to lull Tin-Tin to sleep in his arms. So when he got up to stretch his legs he figured he'd go check the rest of the villa, because she'd be safe enough. After all, there'd been no more creep sightings, so nothing would happen to her.

He was on his way along the hall on the first floor sleeping area of the villa when he heard a door open at the end of the hallway behind him. He knew it could only be the secret door that led to their Roundhouse tunnel, and wondered who'd been doing what out there at this time of the morning, so turned to see...and stopped dead in his tracks.

"Uh, hi there," said the man he was looking at. A man who, strangely enough, seemed to be in black-and-white rather than real-life color. He was youngish, maybe in his twenties, and clean-cut looking.

"Who are you?" Al asked, taking a few steps in the man's direction.

"Norman," the man replied with a lopsided smile. He turned and looked at the first door nearest the tunnel entryway and pointed at it, then looked back at Alan. "This, uh...this is Cabin 1, right?"

"_What?_" Alan asked and then, as the man turned back to the door and acted like he was twisting a doorknob with his hand, realized who he was seeing. It was the guy who'd been dressed in a woman's dress and wig...from...what was that one..._Psycho_, that was it!

Then, as though he were nothing more than a ghost, "Norman" seemed to open a door and walk right through Tin-Tin's _closed_ doors.

"Holy _shit_!" Al exclaimed, pressing the SOS button on his watch as he sprinted back down the hall to Tin-Tin's room. He keyed in the entry code...but the door wouldn't open. "Tin-Tin!" he yelled, banging on the door, knowing it would do no good. He tried the universal override code, but the keypad didn't respond. "_Tin-Tin_!"

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Tin-Tin rolled over in her sleep, then opened her eyes with a startled gasp. She sat bolt upright in bed, angry that Alan had left her, then slowly calmed herself as she realized that nothing was amiss. It was fairly light in her room thanks to the full moon shining through her balcony doors, and Tin-Tin felt disgusting, having been sweating thanks to whatever dreams or nightmares had been plaguing her in her sleep.

A shower was in order and then maybe she'd go look for Alan just to bawl him out for leaving her alone with holographic killers wandering around the island. That thought firmly in mind, she rose from her bed, shed her nightshirt and made for the shower. Nice and hot to cleanse and soothe, that was exactly what she needed. She sighed happily in anticipation, shower handles squealing a little as she turned them on.

Stepping into the shower, she immediately grabbed the shampoo, wetted her hair down and started working it up into a luxurious lavender-scented lather. On to her favorite Malaysian-manufactured soap, which she rubbed all over her arms, breasts and stomach before putting it down in the soap dish built into her shower wall.

Tin-Tin smiled, the water and aromas surrounding her, relaxing her and making her feel a little less angry with Alan with each passing moment. Maybe she _would_ go find him, she thought...only for a different purpose entirely, than bawling him out. She grinned as her hands worked the soap into her skin and after a time she turned to the right to start rinsing her hair, back to the shower door.

She heard a click and her grin widened into a full-blown toothy smile. "Why, Alan, you're quite presumptuous," she teased, turning to face him, "aren't y—?" Her eyes went wide. It wasn't Alan! Tin-Tin screamed as a knife slashed downward.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

"As one mother to another, you can understand why I'm doing what I'm doing, can't you?"

Grandma Tracy, seated in her rocking chair at the end of her bed, stared wide-eyed at the sweater-wearing woman speaking.

"Those counselors were making _love_ while my little boy _drowned_!" the woman screeched.

Grandma knew the woman looked familiar, but couldn't recall her name. "You're not at a camp," she finally found her voice well enough to say. "You're at our home. This is Tracy Island, not some camp."

"Liar!" she yelled.

Pursing her lips tightly, Grandma rose from her chair, nightgown flowing down around her body and tickling her legs. "I'm sorry about what happened to your son, but that doesn't give you the right to come after me, _my_ son or my _grand_sons."

"Grandsons," the woman choked out, tears filling her eyes. "I'll never get to have grandsons, do you know that?"

Grandma watched as the hand in which the woman held a machete fell slowly to her side. She looked quickly to her right, where Grant's old wooden cane was leaning against the bureau that had once stood in their Kansas farmhouse bedroom. Her hand moved slowly toward it as her eyes turned back to the now-distraught woman.

"I'm awfully sorry the camp counselors weren't paying attention to your little boy," Grandma said gently. "What did you say his name was?"

The woman smiled. "Jason," she whispered, seeming to look inward upon old memories. "My perfect little angelic boy, Jason."

Grandma seized the cane and whirled on the woman, swinging with all her might. There was a loud crack as the cane connected with the woman's skull, and she slumped to the floor, machete clattering as it fell form her hand.

"Honestly," Grandma groused, eying Grant's cane. "Your hard head broke it!" Annoyance firmly in place, she sidestepped the unconscious woman, bent forward and picked up the machete, then made her way for the door. "Definitely real," she muttered as she exited, machete in one hand, cracked cane in the other.

Grandma didn't see the sweater-clad woman begin to move.


	4. Chapter 4

Virgil rubbed his eyes and sighed. Brains was still concentrating fully on a technical readout on the nearest computer monitor and Gordon was pretty sure he hadn't been this tired since the last earthquake International Rescue helped with.

"Nothing," Virgil said, sleep making his voice deeper than usual. "I don't think whatever's happening is connected to this projection equipment, Brains."

"Sure doesn't look like it," Gordon confirmed.

Brains sort of half-grunted, which the young men knew by now meant some form of agreement. Then he said, "I-I'll keep at it."

"Good. My bed's calling my name," Virgil yawned.

Instead of following his brother to bed, Gordon picked up the movie chip that held _Psycho_, which he'd copied from his personal cloud server, and stuck it in a miniature testing projector the other side of the holo-chamber from where Brains was still inspecting data that Gordon couldn't hope to make heads or tails of.

Gordon was going to get to the bottom of this, but had no clue where to start other than the movies themselves.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Virgil scratched his fingertips through his hair as he deposited his water bottle on the nightstand in his room and, basically, fell into bed. He hummed happily as his head hit the pillow, arms sliding beneath and cradling it to the side of his face. Lazily he shook his feet until his flip-flops thunked dully one after another onto the rug-covered hardwood floor and sighed.

Just because they hadn't been able to pinpoint what made these creeps appear to them didn't mean it was anything more than holograms that couldn't hurt them. The engineer in Virgil was certain of this fact, which meant before he could even think another thought about it, he was out like a light.

Almost immediately, he began to dream.

It was night. He was outside, walking down a fog-filled alleyway that seemed to run behind rows of suburban homes. Driveways and garages and back yards lined the narrow asphalt alley and when he stopped walking and looked up and to the right, he saw a white picket fence with a white picket archway covering a gate that led from the alley into a home's back yard. Just then the lid of an old-style metal garbage can came rolling down the alley toward him. The sound of it made him jump, and when it noisily rattled to a stop, he caught sight of it and breathed a sigh of relief. There wasn't anything there but the lid.

That's when things took a turn.

At the far end of the alley where it became a T intersection, against the white backdrop of a garage's double-wide car door, a shadow appeared. It looked like a figure wearing some kind of hat. Virgil felt chills go up and down his spine. The chills turned to all-out ice in his blood when a figure emerged and began walking toward him, growling as it came nearer. The figure wore a hat, all right. And a red striped sweater and seemed to be a man...but his skin looked horrid, burned, as though years ago he'd been the victim of some terrible fire.

But it wasn't any of those things that turned Virgil's blood to ice. It was the man's hands. All eight fingers and both thumbs looked normal enough until you got to the ends of them...where they turned into ten razor blades that glinted off local yard lights. They looked sharp. They looked _deadly_. Virgil knew this was that movie killer called Freddy. Freddy's arms elongated unnaturally, to twice their normal length, accompanied by a low, evil-sounding laugh.

And then he started running the tips of his razor claws against a fence to his right, continuing to advance on Virgil, the most ear-splitting screech now accompanying the still-low laughter. "Please, God," Virgil whispered, feeling like nothing more than a frightened child trapped in a nightmare.

"This!" the man's gravelly voice ground out, raising his right hand and wiggling the fingers and razor blades in the air. "_Is_ God!"

Virgil turned and ran.

He hadn't gotten more than a few steps when he bumped – literally – into Freddy, who'd suddenly gone from chasing him to being right _there_. Virg let out a yelp and turned to run back the other direction. Then he bolted through a nearby open gate into someone's backyard, only to find the creep mere steps behind him. He stared in shock as Freddy, now with no razor blade glove on his left hand, use the razors on his right to cut his fingers off.

The guy was fucking _nuts_!

Virg turned toward the house with the intent of making it through the back door, but Freddy caught him and wrestled him to the ground. Virgil reached up to grab his face in the struggle and what seemed to be a mask came off in his hand...revealing eyeballs glaring at him from a white-bone bloody skull. The skull face laughed maniacally, and then somehow Virgil was covered by a fluffy blue blanket. All he could do was struggle as Freddy continued laughing and pinning him down, looking like he was more than ready to use those razor blade fingernails...all ten of which were now back in place.

Virgil knew he was screaming. And he didn't care. His last thought was that he knew who the guy was, from the photos Gordon had shown him, but that this was no damn hologram. Not that it mattered, he realized, as the first razor blade sliced into him.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

At first, Scott was just annoyed. He'd been trying to raise Virgil on his wristwatch since Gordon advised Virg had gone to bed ten minutes earlier. There's no way even Virgil could've gotten to his room from the lab and gone to sleep _that_ quickly. But Virg wasn't answering his comm and since the locator told him the watch was in Virgil's bedroom suite, that's where Scott headed at a rapid gait.

What happened next turned Scott's annoyance to a mixture of confusion and concern. For when he pressed his thumb on the keypad next to Virgil's bedroom door, the door didn't budge. In fact, the keypad didn't even light up or give the customary soft beep it usually gave to announce that it had read and approved the thumbprint's owner for entry.

Scott frowned and tried again. Nothing. So he keyed in Virgil's code which, of course, he knew. Still nothing. Then the universal override code. Nothing. What the _hell_ was going on all of a sudden with the island's equipment? First the damn movie projectors and now the door locks?

All-out scowling now, Scott lifted his wristwatch to his face. "Scott calling Brains, come in, Brains."

No response. Scott got a good look at his watch. It _appeared_ normal. "Scott calling Gordon. Come in."

Nope.

"The fuck?" Scott groused. He looked up at the keypad, startled to note it had lit up all on its own, and as though he still had his thumb against the print-read square, announced the entrant as him and allowed the door to swish open.

Stalking through the outer sitting room of Virgil's bedroom suite, Scott suddenly stopped at a sight he couldn't _hope_ to explain. "Virgil?" he breathed.

There Virgil was, spread-eagle on his bed, looking like he was being bounced around yet somehow still held in place. The tee shirt he'd been wearing all day and into the night suddenly ripped open right down the middle, exposing Virgil's entire chest and abdomen. Before Scott could even leap into action, four perfectly-spaced slice marks suddenly appeared top to bottom as though Virgil were actually at that very moment being cut by four razor-sharp knives.

"Virgil!" Scott cried out, taking the remaining distance between the sitting room and Virgil's bed in four long strides.

Virgil yelled out in pain, hands moving to cover the cuts, blood pouring out of them. Yet Virgil didn't even look _awake_ to Scott. He looked like...like he was having a nightmare. Only _this..._it wasn't just any nightmare.

Scott reached out to make a grab for Virgil's arm but without warning, Virgil was lifted into the air head-level with Scott, and started spinning around, crying out and screaming in pain and what sounded like terror. As Virgil's legs swung his way, they hit Scott so hard he flew across the room, slamming into the wall. Hanging artwork clattered to the floor. Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, Scott looked up to find Virgil being thrown into the far corner of the room.

Scrambling to his feet, Scott ran toward his brother, only to suddenly have Virgil start being dragged upside-down, _up_ the wall, then onto the ceiling, dragged across as though the ceiling were the floor instead. Scott jumped into the air, trying to grab at the tattered tee hanging from Virgil's body, but it was _just_ out of reach.

"_Virgil!_" he yelled, hit the SOS button on his watch and then tried grabbing for him again as he got dragged along the ceiling to the middle of the bedroom, directly over the bed. Virg was rolling around on the ceiling, still screaming bloody murder, and then suddenly dropped to the bed like a stone. When he hit the mattress, it made a splashing sound, and buckets of blood spattered outward, covering Scott and most of the bedroom.

As Virgil bounced up from the bed, Scott lunged forward and tackled him to it before he could bounce right off onto the floor. The combined motion made both of them bounce wildly for a few seconds, and it was in those few seconds Scott realized his brother had gone silent.

What Scott didn't realize was that they weren't alone in the room anymore. He was too busy yelling Virgil's name and trying to understand what he'd just seen to hear the soft "Ch ch ch ha ha ha" coming from behind him. Too busy slipping and sliding in all the blood covering Virgil's half-naked body, trying to get a look at his face to see if his eyes were open, trying to figure out in the mess if he was breathing, to notice the large shadow that suddenly loomed over him.

It was the next sound, which Scott couldn't really identify other than to know it was out of place, that caught his attention. He turned his head toward it, directly behind him, and had just enough time to register a battered-looking hockey mask when a huge machete was plunged into the center of his back.

He felt his legs go numb as his head fell onto his brother's shoulder. In those few moments of silence as blood and life leaked from Scott's body, he knew Virgil wasn't breathing. Soon, neither was he.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Alan was beet red from anger and frustration and not being able to get into Tin-Tin's bedroom when suddenly the keypad to the right of her door bleeped on and allowed him access. The door swished open, Alan nearly falling flat on his face when it gave beneath his left hand. He managed to keep his feet beneath him, but when he passed the sitting room and got into Tin-Tin's bedroom proper, he frowned. Because she wasn't in bed, and not only that, her nightshirt was on the floor nearby.

That's when it registered that the shower was running. "Tin-Tin?" he called out, making his way across the room to the bathroom door. Somewhere in the distance, it seemed like very far away, another voice filtered through to him.

"Mother! Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!"

Alan's head whipped around toward the voice, which seemed to be coming from the closed sliding glass door, then he turned back to the bathroom. "Tin-Tin?"

There was no sound but the running shower, so he pushed the door all the way open and was man enough to admit the sound he made was something between a shriek and a scream. For there lay Tin-Tin half-in and half-out of the tub, left cheek against the hard tile floor, and one of the shower doors half off its track.

"_Tin-Tin!_ Oh, my _God_!" Alan cried, falling to his knees next to her. But he knew without even touching her that she was gone. The one eye he could see was wide open but lifeless. Hot water dripped down the length of her back toward her neck, with her butt and legs being beat on directly by the shower.

When Al looked over the edge of the tub, he saw bright red blood rushing along with the water and spiraling down the drain. "Oh, my God," he breathed, tears filling his eyes and spilling down his cheeks. He began sobbing as he tried lifting her wet, slippery body up to get her out of the tub, but in his grief and disbelief he lost his grip and her face hit the floor again with a dull thud.

Then Al heard a groan. A groan that didn't quite sound human.

Alan whirled, slipping a little on the water that had splashed on the bathroom floor. He didn't see anything at first in the moonlight coming through the sliding glass doors, but again a low moan came to his ears, making goosebumps rise on his skin and the hair at the nape of his neck stand on end.

Cautiously he made his way out of the bathroom back into Tin-Tin's bedroom, and that's when he saw something that was completely impossible to be seeing. He'd know what it was anywhere, and that was the problem. It wasn't _real_.

And yet, it was.

"Jesus Christ," Alan whispered as the thing towered over him. Its skin was gray and death-like, its hair dirty-looking and disheveled. It had what looked like big corks sticking out either side of its neck and empty eyes stared at him from a large face with a too-large forehead. Alan backed away from the bathroom door until he hit the wall, and then thought to hit the SOS on his watch as the creature took slow lumbering steps toward him, its arms outstretched.

Alan could see the stitch marks on its neck, its head. It stood a good seven feet tall and was as wide as two Virgils standing next to each other. Al tried getting all the way to the wall, but fell over boxes that Tin-Tin had recently received from storage on the mainland, and was currently in the process of going through.

Well..._had_ been in the process.

The creature...Frankenstein's monster, there was no doubt...advanced on Alan, groaning like it was in pain as it came nearer...nearer.

Why wasn't anyone coming to Alan's aid? He'd hit the SOS. He slapped it again for good measure. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere except, if he could get the sliding glass doors open in time, the balcony. But then where? It was at least sixty feet from Tin-Tin's balcony to the ledge on the montainside below it, and even Alan couldn't make that kind of a fall without breaking something.

But he had to chance it, or face whatever it was this monster intended for him.

As Alan scrambled over the mess of boxes and their contents, he felt the monster's hand reach out and brush against his hair. Sweat broke out on Al's upper lip. It beaded up at his sideburns and started trickling down his neck. His tee shirt dampened at the armpits and between his shoulder blades. He had nothing at all on his mind but escaping Tin-Tin's room.

Only the latch on the sliding glass door was stuck. He fought with it for a handful of seconds before turning to see where the monster was. But it was too late. The monster was there. In a flash his large hands were around Alan's throat. Al grabbed the thing's wrists and tried to pull them away, but the creature was too strong...his hands simply wouldn't budge!

"No," Alan croaked as his airway began collapsing under the superhuman grip. Al tried kicking, tried wiggling, squirming, wrenching himself out of the monster's grasp...all to no avail. The more he moved, the faster his windpipe was crushed. He saw his vision narrow to mere pinpoints of light, the garish face of Frankenstein's monster the very last thing he would ever see.


	5. Chapter 5

Gordon had made it to the part of the movie where Marion Crane was just getting undressed in Cabin 1 of the Bates Motel, with Norman Bates peeping at her through a hole in the wall between his parlor and her room. Everything seemed perfectly normal on this small projector. The movie was playing just as it had on the larger screen and so far there'd been no calls from anyone on the island about seeing, talking to or being chased by freaks.

In the film, the camera moved from him being able to see Marion in a bra, back to a side shot of Norman's eye as he watched her through the peephole. Then the view switched again, and Gordon remembered the next scene should've been Marion Crane in her underwear again.

But that wasn't what he saw.

He nearly stopped breathing. For the room in the next shot wasn't Cabin 1 at the Bates Motel. And the woman in the room wasn't Marion Crane. The room was Tin-Tin's, right here on this island. And the woman in the bed...was Tin-Tin.

Gordon gaped as the scene, still in black-and-white, showed Tin-Tin waking as though from a nightmare, sitting bolt upright in bed with sweat pouring down her neck, and looking suitably frightened. Then she appeared to look angry about something and Gordon guessed it was because Alan had gone to bed with her but wasn't there just now when she woke.

Then he realized what he was thinking. And seeing. There was something terribly wrong. But he couldn't make himself look away long enough to try and figure out what that was.

Tin-Tin got out of bed and took her nightshirt off, letting it fall to the floor, and walked buck naked to her bathroom. He watched her backside as she turned the shower knobs on, hearing them squeal a little when she did. She felt the water and when it was just the right temperature, she stepped in and closed the shower door behind her.

Gordon watched her shampoo her hair. He watched her run her favorite old-style bar of soap all over her arms, her breasts, her stomach. He watched as she put the soap down in the soap dish and used her hands to work the lather into her skin. He was barely aware that he was basically perving on a naked Tin-Tin taking a shower because of the heightened awareness that this was on his damn _Psycho_ movie that he was seeing this!

Tin-Tin's face changed, countenance sliding from annoyed to a little dreamy to slightly devilish. She turned under the water, allowing it to rinse the shampoo from her hair and the soap from her body. When she was facing the wall, with her back to the shower door, the camera angle switched. Gordon was now looking toward the shower door and what he saw made him grip the edge of the metal table he was sitting at so tightly his knuckles turned white.

A shadow entered her bathroom. From the frosted panes of the shower doors it was impossible to tell who it was, but in the pit of his stomach, Gordon knew. Tin-Tin still had her back to the door when the figure loomed outside it. The snick of the door opening was heard. Tin-Tin turned to face the intruder, looked up and screamed. And then the camera showed him why. There was a figure, who appeared to be a woman, with a chef's knife raised high in the air. Gordon watched in horror as slice after slice after slice, the knife came down, the sound of it piercing Tin-Tin's flesh tearing through Gordon's mind. Tin-Tin screamed, tried to fend her attacker off...and then there was no sound at all.

The attacker...whom Gordon knew to be Norman Bates dressed as his mother...left the bathroom in a hurry.

Tin-Tin's hands grasped at the tile wall of her shower, then she turned, back against the tile, and slid down to her knees, water splattering at her from the still-running shower. Gordon saw blood and water running down Tin-Tin's body as she reached out, grabbed the edge of the slid-open shower door, and dislodged it as she fell forward, doubled over the edge of the tub at her stomach. Her head made a sickeningly dead thud as it hit the bathroom floor, and the camera focused on her unmoving, unflinching wide-open eye as it pulled away.

Gordon had just watched Tin-Tin Kyrano die in a movie from 1960 that was on a computer chip downloaded from his own personal iCloud.

It wasn't possible.

And yet somehow...in some way...it was there. Right there before his very eyes. Could it...could that...could Tin-Tin really be...?

Gordon leapt to his feet. "Brains!" he hollered. But the scientist was no longer sitting in the chair on the opposite wall. Gordon went tearing out of the holographic chamber. "Brains!" he yelled as he entered the tertiary main lab room. He looked left, right, front...but no Brains. "What the—Brains!"

Silence was his only answer. Gordon lifted his watch to his face and called out to Tin-Tin as he raced through the secondary and main lab rooms, finally reaching the quadruple-reinforced quadritanium door. He keyed it open and raced through, headed for the nearby elevator. "Tin-Tin!" he called into the watch again. Yet she didn't answer.

"Alan!" he tried next, figuring he'd know where Tin-Tin was since earlier he was taking her to bed to try and get her to sleep. "Aw, come on...Al!"

No response.

The butt of Gordon's hand slammed on the up arrow at the elevator. The doors swished open with a quiet ding, and he stepped in, turned, and told it to take him way up to the first floor of the villa. All the while, Gordon tried raising each family member in turn – John included, up on Thunderbird 5 – to no avail. He hit the SOS button on his watch as the elevator deposited him on the first floor. Without stopping to check the Lounge or the kitchen, he sprinted straight back to the first floor hallway of bedrooms, where four guest rooms, plus the rooms of Grandma, Tin-Tin and Kyrano were located.

When he got to Tin-Tin's door, he put his thumb on the keypad. The doors obediently swished open and he ran through the sitting room to the bedroom and stopped so fast he nearly fell on his face.

He couldn't be seeing what he was seeing. It wasn't...it couldn't. "Al?"

There, slumped against the sliding glass door on the other side of Tin-Tin's bed, was Alan. His eyes were open but only the whites were visible. And he looked..."No," Gordon whispered.

He raced around the end of the bed, knelt next to Alan and felt for a pulse at his carotid. There was no pulse. Alan really was...he...he couldn't be, but...Gordon squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head, willing the panic, the fear, the grief all away so he could figure out what the hell had happened here.

Gordon reopened his eyes, and could see in the bright moonlight that there were distinct fingerprints around his brother's neck. But no sooner did he notice that, than he became aware of something else: the shower in Tin-Tin's bathroom was on.

"Oh, God," he choked out, forcing himself to his feet and running into the bathroom. And there she was, just like she'd fallen in the movie...wet hair, open eye and shower still running. Gordon backed out of the bathroom, gasping as his hand flew to his mouth. He pressed himself against the wall just outside the bathroom and closed his eyes, guts turning to jelly, stomach threatening to reject everything he'd had to eat in the past twenty-four hours.

Alan. And Tin-Tin. He hadn't seen Al in the _Psycho_ scene, only Tin-Tin, just as she looked now. But how? _How?_

Gordon smacked the SOS button on his watch again as he bolted out of Tin-Tin's room and sprinted up the nearby stairs to the second floor bedrooms. Scott's was empty. But when he got into Virgil's, he found it wasn't.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Brains had umpteen dozen bits and pieces of electrical equipment – basically, the holographic projector torn carefully apart – spread out on the large metal lab table before him. He was seated on a tall stool, hunched over the actual projection mechanism, picking at it with a pair of tweezers and completely oblivious to the world around him. His mind wrestled with what in the world could have caused the projections of movie characters throughout Tracy Island.

Never mind how it was Jeff could've had a conversation with one.

The good thing, and sometimes the bad thing, about Brains was that when he was focused on something that consumed his mind – which was a good 23.25 hours per day – a bomb could go off next to him and he'd be hard-pressed to notice. It was a well-known fact in the Tracy household that if Grandma, Kyrano or one of the others didn't actually bring food directly to Brains and sort of put it in the way of whatever he was working on, he'd never eat.

So it was that when Gordon had yelled for Brains from two rooms away, he hadn't heard him. And some ten minutes after that, Brains still was lost in his own world, a world of intricate micro-circuitry and futuristic holographic crystals and microchips. He didn't hear footsteps making their slow and steady way toward him from the lab entrance. He didn't notice the figure loom nearer and nearer, a white mask with brown hair covering its head, blue auto mechanic's overalls covering his body, big workboots on his feet.

He didn't see a hand reach out to where a wad of cables was sticking out from the wall to his right. He wasn't aware of any of this going on behind him until the hand successfully yanked the entire set of thick black cables completely out of the wall. If anyone had had the chance to ask, Brains might've said it was the wall plaster that landed atop what he was working on which alerted him, more than the sound if the cables being torn from the wall.

Brains scowled at the piece of intruding plaster, and opened his mouth to ask what was going on as he began to swivel in the stool to get a visual. His head never got the chance to turn. He never saw the heavily breathing man in the painted-over William Shatner mask take one of the black cables and hold it taught over Brains' neck. His arms and legs barely had time to flail; his genius mind barely had time to comprehend what was happening to him. Equations and calculations fled into the ether, and the great light that had powered Jeff Tracy's dream flickered as his windpipe was crushed, dimmed as oxygen stopped going into his lungs, and finally went out.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Gordon was in a complete panic now. He couldn't raise anyone on his wrist comm, not even John. He'd lost what little was in his stomach coming on the scene of Scott and Virgil dead in Virgil's room and was now frantically searching John's room, but there was no one there. He went next to Alan's room, also finding it empty. He made his way to his own room, terrified of what he might discover...but that, too, was empty. When he tried his father's suite door, and then further along the door leading to its adjacent study, the keypads refused to allow him in. They wouldn't even light up, let alone recognize his override code.

He tore down the steps to the first floor, checking each and every guest bedroom on the way to Tin-Tin's. Well, he knew who was in there. His stomach lurched and fear gripped every cell of his body as he thought of Alan's lifeless body...of Tin-Tin's cold dead eye staring across the bathroom floor. Of the bloodbath in Virgil's room, with Virgil slashed to pieces and a huge machete sticking out of Scott's back that went straight through the both of them.

Where was his father? Where was his grandmother? And why couldn't he get John to answer him? Why was his dad's room's keypad not functioning? What the _hell_ was going _on_?

He made it to his grandma's room and the keypad worked just fine. The door swished open, and he saw a figure lying in the floor in the middle of her bedroom. Cautiously he made his way through her sitting room; the moon wasn't as bright here as it had been in Tin-Tin's or Virgil's rooms, so he had a little trouble adjusting his eyes to the darkness. He reached out a hand to touch the light panel, but then realized he didn't need to.

He knew exactly who was lying on the floor with a machete stuck right through her mouth. He knew because he recognized the old cane lying across her body, and the crocheted slippers his grandmother had made herself, covering the feet. "Grandma," he breathed.

But...if Scott had been killed by a machete...who had done it...was it Jason? Or his mother? Gordon turned the light on and moved forward. That was it, wasn't it, his mind wondered. Norman Bates had killed Tin-Tin. That, Gordon had witnessed – somehow – on film. He wasn't entirely sure from the amount of blood covering Virgil's room if he'd been the victim of the machete sticking out of Scott's back or not, but he suspected if their deaths were being done by movie character killers, Virgil might've been the victim of Freddy Krueger, given the scene. So then who'd skewered Scott, and done this horrible thing to his grandmother?

Did it matter? Because if all of them were dead, wouldn't he soon be, too?

"She deserved it, boy," came a cigarette-destroyed voice from his right. Gordon whirled and froze. "She was meddling in my duty as a mother, telling me it wasn't my place to kill those who caused the death of my Jason. She even hit me on the head with that cane!" An accusatory finger pointed down to the cracked cane lying across his grandmother's pelvis.

"Mrs. Voorhees," Gordon gulped. "You're not real. You're a movie character. You _all_ are." Fight-or-flight was seriously kicking in. And she wasn't armed. Gordon got the idea he could make it past her and out into the hallway fairly easily if he moved fast.

"I'm real enough to kill _her_," Mrs. Voorhees proclaimed. "And you're next, boy!" She lunged for the handle of the machete. Gordon vaulted over his grandmother's body, sailed past Voorhees just out of her reach and sprinted for the door. It opened and he raced into the hall, then turned as it was shutting to see Mrs. Voorhees running toward him through the bedroom with the bloody machete in her hand. He quickly keyed in the universal lockdown code, and just as she reached the nearly-closed door, the keypad complied, forcing the door shut all the way, telltale locks clicking into place.

Wide-eyed, panting from exertion, disbelief, fear and a myriad of other emotions jockeying for his attention, Gordon leaned against the wall. They were just movies. Just good, old-fashioned non-scary fun. They weren't real. Goddammit, they weren't _real_!


	6. Chapter 6

"No, son, I don't think that's it. I just can't believe that if this were some errant projection from a movie, I could've had a full-fledged conversation with the woman."

"And Brains hasn't figured out what's wrong with the equipment yet?" John asked from the video monitor in the wall of his father's bedroom.

"No," Jeff shook his head, toeing off his slip-on shoes and sitting on the edge of his bed. "I can tell you it's making it awfully hard for anyone to want to sleep, which is going to be disastrous if we get a call."

"I wish I'd found something on the scans, Father, but they all came up negative," John advised, looking to the left at a bank of computer monitors before returning his attention to his dad. "Didn't you say Virgil was helping Brains and Gordon down in the lab?"

"The three of them were attacking things from that angle, while Scott was looking the theater over for any extra lenses or projection equipment. Why do you ask?"

"Well, Virgil's in his room, and Scott's in there with him. Gordon's not in the lab either, he's in the hallway outside Grandma's room."

"What about Grandma and everyone else?"

"In her room. Brains is in the lab. Tin-Tin and Alan are in her room, though not in the same spot in her room. Kyrano's in his meditation room. All according to their watch GPS's, of course."

"Not a single other sign of life still, then, I'm guessing."

"None but you, Dad."

Jeff sighed and rubbed his temple, trying to stave off the beginnings of a nasty headache. "This is ridiculous. It hasn't happened since that first time when all of us encountered someone from those movies. Maybe it was just some sort of mass hallucination."

"Caused by what?"

"Hell if I know. With our luck, something Brains was experimenting with," Jeff groused. "It's not like he hasn't given us all moments of...what is it Gordon called it?...what-the-fuckery? Before."

John laughed out loud. "That sounds like something Gordon would come up with."

Jeff turned sideways in his bed, lifted his legs and just laid there on top of the old quilt he'd had on his bed since he was a teenager. He sighed again, bone-tired and ready for at least a few hours of shuteye.

"Anything else you want me to try?" John asked. "Maybe I could raise Brains or Virgil, see what they've come up with?"

"Yeah, that's fine," Jeff replied. "I'll get a catnap in. Just direct back into this screen here after you talk to them."

"Will do, Dad. Be back in a bit."

The video screen feed went to blue, meaning John was keeping the line on hold, bathing Jeff's bedroom in a strange but calming glow. He closed his eyes and willed himself to fall into one of those quick catnaps he'd gotten so used to taking in his Air Force days. Boy, when you were in a combat zone, you couldn't afford not to sleep with one eye open. Just a few minutes would do, and then John would be back with him telling him what was going on down in the lab.

Nearly there, into that twilight between wakefulness and sleep, Jeff thought he heard a swishing sound, but not like his door...more like fabric. He absently wondered what that sound was, but was too interested in pushing himself into the catnap state to wonder too hard about it.

Until, that was, he felt his bed move.

Jeff's eyes snapped open, every muscle tensed for what he might see. But what he saw wasn't anything that he expected.

Kneeling on the other side of his bed, no more than an arm's length from him, was a man who was deathly pale, whose black hair was slicked back, the front of it in a V shape. The man was dressed in a fine tuxedo and wore a black cape. His lips were pale as well, but when he opened his mouth to smile, it wasn't the lips that made Jeff stare.

It was the fangs.

Jeff made to launch himself off the bed but a strong hand caught his arm and held him there. He took a swing at the creature his mind kept calling Dracula but also kept refusing to call something that didn't exist, but Dracula caught the swing mid-air, long-nailed fingers digging into Jeff's flesh as he forced him back down flat onto the bed with his arms above his head.

Kicking and jerking his body around as much as he could, Jeff landed a good kick to Dracula as the undead man lifted his leg to straddle Jeff's body. But as soon as his weight was on Jeff's pelvis, Jeff made the mistake of looking into the Count's eyes.

What he saw made no sense. The eyes seemed endless, as though they went far beyond their owner's head and reached into the vast expanse of the universe. Jeff could see things in those eyes, things that were unreal and yet were right there before him. Events, places...buildings and vehicles and people of the past, but not Jeff's past. These were images of ancient times, as though the vampire's entire existence was being played out for Jeff to see.

He noted that Dracula was licking his fangs out of his peripheral vision, but he couldn't stop the eye-lock. Some part of him said he had to break free, that he'd heard enough of Gordon's stories and remembered enough from his own childhood to know he had to _stop_ looking into Dracula's eyes. Yet such an overwhelming desire came over him, a want, a need, every cell in his body crying out to belong to this creature of darkness looming over him.

A desire so irresistible that when Dracula leaned down, Jeff's body went limp. Of his own accord he turned his face to the side, baring the side of his neck. He felt the vampire's tongue dart out and lick his skin, and let out an audible gasp, his body shuddering in response. And then there was a sickening crunch.

Too late, he realized Dracula's fangs had penetrated his skin. That he was sucking the blood out of his body so fast it was nearly half gone inside a minute. Too late he realized he'd been mesmerized by this fiend, so that when he tried to struggle, he was too weak to get out from under the undead man who now laid the full length of his body feasting on what Jeff had to offer.

A lone tear trickled out of Jeff's eye as the blue glow of his room began to fade to black.

John's image replaced the blue screen. He was looking away from the monitor, fussing with buttons and switches and keyboards as he began to speak. "I can't raise Brains, but that doesn't surprise me given how he blocks out the world when he gets into something like this."

Jeff thought of his sons. He thought of his mother and father. Of his best friend Kyrano, and of Tin-Tin.

"Weird thing is, I can't get Virgil to answer, but that's happened before too, as you know. Guy sleeps like a damn rock."

But then...like a beacon in the night beckoning him to give in, Jeff thought of his Lucille.

At last, John looked directly at the monitor. His already pale face drained of all the color it had when he got eyes on what the hell was happening in his father's room. "Oh, my _God_! _Dad_!"

She was the last thought on his mind as the final drop of blood left his body.

"Dad, answer me!"

Dracula looked up at John and stared hard at him for a handful of seconds. John was mesmerized, unable to look away. Then the Count looked away, got off the bed and disappeared into the shadows of Jeff's room. The video screen that showed John his father lying motionless on his bed, and that showed John himself staring blankly into the ether, went black.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

Gordon recovered his wits well enough to try to gain entry into Kyrano's room, but once again the keypad refused to work. He thundered up the steps to the second floor and tried the first door he came to, that of his father's study. He had to find someone..._any_one...still alive. He couldn't be in this nightmare, he just couldn't! And not alone! Someone had to be there to tell him it wasn't really happening, that this was nothing more than a sick, twisted Halloween prank, maybe being pulled by his family to get back at him for past haunts he'd engineered over the years. That had to be it.

And yet...how could you play dead as well as Tin-Tin had?

How could you fake having no pulse? Because he was one hundred percent certain that Alan hadn't had one.

The keypad next to Jeff's suite door _refused_ to light up. Gordon slammed his fist into it and headed down the hall.

No. They'd been really and truly dead. And the stench of death in Virgil's room was far too familiar to a man who faced that kind of death every time he went out on a rescue. Scott and Virgil _had_ to have been dead, they couldn't have manufactured that.

Plus, there was no _way_ Virgil would mess his room up with that much red, whether it was water-based paint or not.

His family members were being killed one by one, seemingly by horror or slasher movie characters. If only his father's suite door would op—

Gordon's jaw dropped when the keypad next to his father's suite door blinked green and the doors swished open. He walked in, terrified of what he might find. When he reached the doorway between his father's sitting room and bedroom, he saw his dad lying there motionless on the bed, but didn't dare speak in case someone was in the room with them.

He crept across the open expanse of floor between the sitting room and the bed, head turning every which way. There wasn't any movement. In fact, there wasn't a single sound. Gordon's heart leapt into his throat, then plummeted to his toes when he realized that meant his father wasn't even breathing. You could always hear Jeff breathe when he was asleep, thanks to the fact that even lightly sleeping he had a bit of a snore. When sleeping heavily, every person in the house was glad all rooms were soundproof or Jeff would've kept them all awake, he sawed logs so loudly.

But now, there was nothing. He didn't want to check, but knew he had to, so Gordon reached out and placed a hand on his father's neck. Not only was there no pulse, but his father was cold to the touch. Gordon sank to his knees. He just didn't know what to do anymore. He was pretty sure now that if he went back down to the lab, he'd find Brains had been killed. And while there wasn't any immediate way to see how his dad had died, the complete whiteness of his skin told Gordon it might've been an exsanguination...which could only be Dracula.

That thought struck a chord and Gordon lifted his head, the wheels of his mind turning.

Norman had gotten Tin-Tin. Jason and his mother had gotten Scott and Grandma. Virgil had probably been killed by Freddy. Michael Myers had strangled to kill, could that have been who got Alan? Those had all been characters he'd been watching what was now four whole nights ago. Well, not Jason, but he was related to the movie Gordon had watched.

Gordon suddenly got to his feet and looked at the near side of his father's neck, then moved his head so he could see the other side. There they were: two perfectly round puncture wounds, just like you'd see in Dracula movies. But why Dracula? That character had nothing to do with the films Gordon had watched. Now, it was a movie he definitely had on his iCloud movie server, of course it was – and in several different forms, so many had been made through the years. But he hadn't watched them, nor had he watched the second _Friday the 13__th_ where Jason appears.

So where were these things coming from? How were they manifesting?

Manifesting.

The last time he'd had a conversation with anyone about manifestations was while working on an underwater vegetable farm. With Kyrano.

"Kyrano!" he breathed. Of course! Why hadn't he thought about the man until now? "Dammit!"

Gordon ran back to the door of his dad's suite, raced into the hall and back down the steps again. He tried in vain to hit the SOS on his watch, then to call John on it. He knew it wouldn't help, but was unwilling to be the typical stupid guy-in-a-horror movie who didn't do any rational thing when the bad guys were on his tail.

That's what he was in, he realized, as he skidded to a halt in front of Kyrano's suite door. He was in a horror movie – and a really, really bad one, at that – it had to be. None of this could be real. It had to be some otherworldly thing, because as far-fetched as that sounded, it was more plausible than movie characters coming to life and slaughtering everyone on Tracy Island.

And where otherworldly things were concerned, Kyrano was the man to go to.

"Kyrano!" Gordon called out as he tried his thumb on the keypad. It, of course, didn't respond. He pounded on the door, stupidly, he knew, but pounded nonetheless, then tried the keypad again. Nothing.

Gordon raced to his left along the hall to the separate room that was adjacent to Kyrano's suite, which he used as an exercise and meditation room. Many an hour had Gordon spent in here with Kyrano teaching him different moves to both relax and strengthen his lower back. They'd discussed their plants for underwater farming here sometimes, and sometimes just worked out together. Oftentimes Tin-Tin joined them, and Alan, to the point where Jeff had once joked that he wondered why the island had a full gym on the lower levels at all, the way everyone gathered around Kyrano to work out.

But that was just how Kyrano was. Something drew you to him, and Gordon had become very good friends with the older man over the years of living and working with him. Kyrano would tell him everything would be okay. That none of this was what it seemed. If, that was, Gordon could get to him.


	7. Chapter 7

"Kyrano! Dammit, Kyrano, I know it's soundproofed, but you can hear me, can't you? Come on, Kyrano, open up!" Gordon tried the keypad again, but it still wouldn't work. So he grumbled, "To hell with this," and popped the keypad panel right off. There was a white plastic latticework-like framework beneath, which he stuck his fingertips into and ripped right out of the box that was recessed in the wall, exposing all the wires and chips and little tiny cables that connected the keypad to the rest of the house's electrical and computer systems.

"The little red wire," Gordon mumbled, yanking it from its soldered-on spot, "and the little blue wire," he continued, pulling that one out as well. The panel popped and sparked and just like that, the door to Kyrano's meditation room swished obediently open. "Ha!" he crowed, and ran into the huge room beyond.

And stopped wide-eyed. Because yes, Kyrano was there...but he was suspended halfway up the wall, hanging by something Gordon couldn't see, with his eyes closed. He was breathing, Gordon could tell by the rise and fall of his chest. But the thing was, Kyrano wasn't in that room alone.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ, are you kidding me?" Gordon asked, voice coming out way more high-pitched than he intended. For standing there in black-and-white, an arm outstretched toward the suspended Kyrano, was none other than "Alfred Hitchcock?"

"Good evening," Alfred droned in the slow drawl Gordon remembered. There was a trailer Hitchcock had done for _Psycho_, in which he took the audience on a tour of the Bates Motel and house. The man before him most definitely looked and sounded like Hitchcock. But unlike the movie serial killers, who'd never been anything but fictional and on film, Hitchcock had once been a real man. And he'd died way the hell back in 1980 or somewhere around there.

So unless Hitchcock had waited almost sixty years to come back to life – in black-and-white, rather than color – this could not possibly be the man who'd directed _Psycho_. Any more than Mrs. Voorhees could be a real person that killed his grandmother, or Freddy Krueger be a real person who sliced Virgil to pieces.

Thus empowered by his own reasoning, Gordon stood straight and tall and looked ol' Alfred right in the eye. "Who are you?" he asked, voice steady. "And what do you want?"

"My boy, you know perfectly well who I am. After all, I'm on one of your movie shorts, am I not?"

Gordon shook his head. "There's no way you can be Alfred Hitchcock. He's been dead nearly six decades, and the dead don't rise."

"That's not what your zombie films say," came the drawled response. Hitchcock turned his attention back up to Kyrano. "There, I believe he is well enough under control to release." With that, he lowered his arm and Kyrano dropped to the floor like a ragdoll. He didn't move from where he landed slumped against the wall.

"Are you the Hood?" Gordon asked when he realized who they knew that was capable of pulling off fantastic disguises.

Alfred laughed jovially, his stout form shaking with the effort. "I should be terribly insulted by that. He is but an _enfant_ compared to me, young man."

So this wasn't the Hood. That guy's ego was way too big to put his own self down, even for the sake of trying to hide his identity. But if not the Hood, then who?

Or maybe..._what_?

"If you'll pardon me, I'm afraid yours is the last I must take now. Then I shall be sustained for some time, thanks to finding such an easy entry point here on your tropical paradise."

Gordon tried to stall. For what, he didn't know, since he didn't even know what the hell he was up against, let alone how to get rid of it. "What of mine are you intending to take?" Gordon asked, feeling the sweat break out all over his body.

"Why, the same thing I took from each of the others. The same thing building up in you exponentially. You will be my finest feast, for you have seen what's happened to each of the others. It's been building and building and building inside you and now, when confronted with the final test, you know you shall fail."

Gordon's mind raced. Feast? The same thing he took from the others? What, their lives? What was it this...this _thing_...needed?

"Our souls?"

"Oh, no no no, those are for the lesser of my kind. No, my boy," Alfred said, staring right into Gordon's eyes as he slowly and deliberately walked toward him. "Your _fear _is what I crave."

Fear. Which meant...if Gordon didn't feel fear...then this thing wouldn't have any use for him. Gordon glanced down at Kyrano. It's probably why Kyrano was still alive. The man probably _knew_ what this Hitchcock really was, and wasn't afraid of it! _Ergo_, the thing couldn't _kill_ him, it could only try to keep him sedated somehow. Fear. Yeah, Gordon was feeling that shit in spades at the moment. His whole damn _family_ was dead – maybe even John too, for all he knew! How could he _not_ be afraid?

"Illusion," came a whispered voice from the floor. Gordon's eyes widened. He saw Kyrano's eyelids flutter. "Kill him," the man whispered.

Alfred scowled and growled, turning back toward Kyrano and making as though to fling his hand at him. Not knowing what else to do, Gordon ran and jumped onto Hitchcock's back, smacking his arm down. Hitchcock howled, but it wasn't Hitchcock's voice. This was more like a high-pitched squeal, and under Gordon's very body the stout form of the _Psycho_ director began to morph quickly and loudly. Before Gordon knew it, he was no longer clinging to the neck of a man.

He didn't know _what_ he was clinging to.

Its skin was leathery and gleaming black, but with an opaque redness covering it all. Its arms were long and thin, fingers bony and tapering to long claws. It reached a hand back, grabbed Gordon by the back of his shirt and flung him off. Gordon hit the wall opposite Kyrano with a loud thud and slid down the wall onto the exercise mat.

Which was good for him, because now instead of afraid he was royally pissed _off_.

Gordon roared and launched himself off the wall as the creature turned to face him, long snout filled with sharp teeth, drool dripping from each and every one of them, opening wide and screeching at the onslaught. Head low, Gordon drove right into the center of the thing's body, pushing him right back against Kyrano.

Pulling himself away, Gordon watched as Kyrano's hands, planted palm-flat on either side of the creature's head, began to tremble. He heard Kyrano murmuring in a language he couldn't hope to understand, and the creature appeared to be in complete agony the way it writhed under Kyrano's touch.

"Now, Gordon!" Kyrano whispered loudly.

Now? Now _what_? What the hell did Kyrano expect him to do? Gordon looked wildly around the room, and saw the only possible object that could be used as a weapon. When the thing had flung him against the opposite wall, the force of him falling had dislodged a bar that was attached to the wall for steadying yourself when doing certain movements, like Tin-Tin's ballet.

Gordon sprinted across the mat, grabbed the two-foot long piece of pinewood, turned and aimed it squarely at the demon's chest. "Where?" he yelled over the creature's continued screams, noting now that some sort of weird light was surrounding Kyrano's hands and that steam was rising from the thing's head.

"Heart!" Kyrano yelled. "Right through the heart!"

Summoning every ounce of strength he had left in him, Gordon leveled the bar and took off across the room as fast as he could. He felt the end of the bar hit the creature's body, heard an eardrum-breaking howl and then felt something like the force of a sonic boom fling him away. Then Gordon heard no more.

**S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S**

When Gordon came to, the first thing he was aware of was the awful beat of bass drums in his head. Great. He probably had yet another concussion. The second thing he was aware of, was that his head was on something soft, and his hair was being petted.

"Gordon, come now, wake up."

He knew that voice. And then suddenly everything that had happened – including the deaths of nearly all his family members – came back to him. "Kyrano!"

"Shhh," Kyrano soothed, holding Gordon back as he tried to jump to his feet. "It is done. The demon has gone."

"Demon," Gordon gasped, trying to get his breathing under control as he thumped back down onto the mat next to Kyrano. "Alfred Hitchcock was a demon."

"Actually, all the beings your family saw, and those you spoke to, were the demon in disguise."

Gordon looked at Kyrano in believing disbelief. For as out there as it seemed, as much as Gordon didn't _want_ to believe it, he knew he had no choice _but_ to believe. And yet...

"But what about Dad? Virgil? Tin-Tin? Grandma, all of them?"

"They are alive, Gordon. Because we were successful in killing the demon before he returned to his realm, all he did was reversed."

"Reversed," Gordon repeated, staring off into space, trying like hell to put away the horrific visions of his grandmother with a machete through her mouth, or Virgil and Scott in a bloodbath, out of his mind. "I don't understand. Why here? Why choose horror and slasher movie characters?"

"It was a game to him. There is a point here upon Tracy Island where it can be easy for a powerful demon to cross the barrier to our world." Kyrano moved his hand to Gordon's back and Gordon felt a strangely peaceful feeling trying to overtake his latent fear.

"Your movies simply gave him the idea to use the characters _in_ those movies to frighten everyone so much that their fear would be at its height, filling him completely when he took their lives."

"A demon that feeds on fear," Gordon said, and Kyrano nodded in response. "So we killed a demon, and everyone's still alive."

Kyrano nodded again. "And they won't remember any of it, Gordon."

"They won't remember seeing Jason or Michael Myers or any of them?"

"No. Because they were victims, the restoration returned them to a point prior to any of this happening. Only you and I, unaffected by the horror, will know the truth."

"But what about John? He wasn't killed." Gordon gulped. "Was he?"

"The demon had John's fear within him by the time he made his way to me," Kyrano stated. "I felt it when I touched him. I believe he may have taken it from John when John caught him killing your father. Had we not been successful, I'm afraid we would have found John dead aboard Thunderbird 5 had we survived to make the trip."

"Jesus," Gordon breathed, swiping a hand across his forehead. Oddly enough his headache was now gone, but his fear remained. As evidenced by the fact that he jumped a mile when the chime of Kyrano's meditation room door rang that someone was asking for admittance.

Heart pounding, Gordon looked at Kyrano, who nodded at him. "It's your father. Go."

Swallowing hard, Gordon wiped his clammy palms off on his shorts as he rose to his feet and made his way to the door. His hand hesitated over the keypad only a few seconds before he pressed the green button. The door swished open and Jeff looked at him, then did a double-take. "What have you two been up to, you look like you're sweating half the Pacific," he quipped, grinning down at where Kyrano still sat cross-legged on the floor.

Gordon opened his mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. There wasn't a thing he was feeling but relief that his father was standing there in front of him alive and well. And he couldn't make his voice work right now to save his life.

"Alan just came through asking where you were. Something about you guys were supposed to be watching a horror movie marathon starting with something called, uh..._Friday the 13__th_, I think?"

Gordon felt all the blood drain from his face.

"He's got his popcorn and drink but complained that you weren't in the theater."

Gordon swallowed hard, looked back at Kyrano, who offered no help with his placid gaze, then looked at his dad again.

"Well? Should I tell him you're on your way, or what?"

Horror movies?

_Friday the 13__th_?

Theater?

Gordon struggled to keep his flip-flopping stomach from rising up his esophagus. With a shaking hand, Gordon wiped his mouth and shook his head. "Yeah, uh...tell Al I'll catch him next time." He hit the red button on the keypad, and the door swished closed on his father as Gordon turned to look at Kyrano, who gave him a small smile.

Horror movies.

Yeah.

No. Way. In. _Hell_.

**THE END**


End file.
